Kobayashi Makoto

Kobayashi Makoto (born April 7, 1944, Nagoya, Japan) is a Japanese scientist who was a corecipient, with Yoichiro Nambu and Maskawa Toshihide, of the 2008 Nobel Prize for Physics. Kobayashi and Maskawa shared half the prize for their discovery of the origin of broken symmetry, which created at least six quarks moments after the big bang.

Kobayashi received a Ph.D. from Nagoya University in 1972. That same year he and Maskawa proposed that CP violation (the violation of the combined conservation laws associated with charge conjugation [C] and parity [P] by the weak force) is an inherent property of the standard model of subatomic particles if there exist at least two additional quarks beyond the four “flavours” (up, down, charm, and strange) known at that time. These two new quark flavours were experimentally confirmed in 1977 (bottom quark) and 1995 (top quark).

In 1979 Kobayashi became an assistant professor at the High Energy Accelerator Research Organization (KEK) in Tsukuba Science City, and in 1989 he was appointed professor and designated as the head of Physics Division II. He became the director of the Institute of Particle and Nuclear Studies at KEK in 2003, and he was named professor emeritus in 2006. In addition to his Nobel honour, Kobayashi won the J.J. Sakurai Prize (1985) for theoretical particle physics (shared with Maskawa), the Japan Academy Prize (1985), and the Japanese Person of Cultural Merit Award (2001).